(1)190
Nor do they fret me — particularly. But as they furnish our mutual friend with a good handle against us, which he is likely to use any day in that nasty way, so pre-eminently his own, I [would] rather explain them once more — with your kind permission.
(2)
Of course, of course; it is our usual way of getting out of difficulties. Having been "invented" ourselves, we repay the inventors by inventing imaginary races. There are a good many things more we are charged with having invented. Well, well, well; there's one thing, at any rate, we can never be accused of inventing; and that is Mr. Hume himself. To invent his like transcends the highest Siddhi powers we know of.
And now good friend, before we proceed any further, pray read the appended No. [A]. It is time you should know us as we are. Only, to prove to you, if not to him, that we have not invented those races, I will give out for your benefit that which has never been given out before. I will explain to you a whole chapter out of Rhys Davids work on Buddhism, or rather on Lamaism, which, in his natural ignorance he regards as a corruption of Buddhism! Since those gentlemen — the Orientalists — presume to give to the world their soi-disant translations and commentaries on our sacred books, let the theosophists show the great ignorance of those "world" pundits, by giving the public the right doctrines and explanations of what they would regard as an absurd, fancy theory.
(3)
And because I admit the superficial or apparent inconsistency — and even that in the case only of one who is so thoroughly unacquainted with our doctrines as you are — is that a reason why they should be regarded as conflicting in reality? Suppose I had written in a previous letter — "the moon has no atmosphere" and then went on talking of other things; and told you in another letter "for the moon has an atmosphere of his own" etc. no doubt but that I should stand under the charge of saying to-day black and to-morrow white. But where could a Kabalist see in the two sentences a contradiction? I can assure you that he would not. For a Kabalist who knows that the moon has no atmosphere answering in any respect to that of our earth, but one of its own, entirely different from that your men of science would call one, knows also that like the Westerns we Easterns, and Occultists especially, have our own ways of expressing thought as plain to us in their implied meaning as yours are to yourselves. Take for instance into your head to teach your Bearer astronomy. Tell him to-day — "see, how gloriously the sun is setting — see how rapidly it moves, how it rises and sets etc.;" and to-morrow try to impress him with the fact that the sun is comparatively motionless and that it is but our earth that loses and then again catches sight of the sun in her diurnal motion; and ten to one, if your pupil has any brains in his head, he will accuse you of flatly contradicting yourself. Would this be a proof of your ignorance of the heliocentric system? And could you be accused with anything like justice of "writing one thing to-day and denying it to-morrow," though your sense of fairness should prompt you to admit that you "can easily understand" the accusation.
Writing my letters, then, as I do, a few lines now and a few words two hours later; having to catch up the thread of the same subject, perhaps with a dozen or more interruptions between the beginning and the end, I cannot promise you anything like western accuracy. Ergo — the only "victim of accident" in this case is myself. The innocent cross examination to which I am subjected by you — and that I do not object to — and the positively predetermined purpose of catching me tripping whenever he can, on Mr. Hume's part, — a proceeding regarded as highly legal and honest in western law, but to which we, Asiatic savages, object most emphatically — has given my colleagues and Brothers a high opinion of my proclivities to martyrdom. In their sight I have become a kind of Indo-Tibetan Simeon Stylites. Caught by the lower hook of the Simla interrogation mark and impaled on it, I see myself doomed to equilibrize upon the apex of the semicircle for fear of slipping down at every uncertain motion either backward or forward. — Such is the present position of your humble friend. Ever since I undertook the extraordinary task of teaching two grown up pupils with brains in which the methods of western science had crystallized for years; one of whom is willing enough to make room for the new iconoclastic teaching, but who, nevertheless, requires a careful handling, while the other will receive nothing but on condition of grouping the subjects as he wants them to group, not in their natural order — I have been regarded by all our Chohans as a lunatic. I am seriously asked whether my early association with Western "Pelings" had not made of me a half-Peling and turned me also into a "dzing-dzing" visionary. All this had been expected. I do not complain; I narrate a fact, and humbly demand credit for the same, only hoping it will not be mistaken again for a subtle and tricky way of getting out of a new difficulty.
(5)
Every just disembodied four-fold entity — whether it died a natural or violent death, from suicide or accident, mentally sane or insane, young or old, good, bad, or indifferent — loses at the instant of death all recollection, it is mentally — annihilated; it sleeps it's akasic sleep in the Kama-loka. This state lasts from a few hours, (rarely less) days, weeks, months — sometimes to several years. All this according to the entity, to its mental status at the moment of death, to the character of its death, etc. That remembrance will return slowly and gradually toward the end of the gestation (to the entity or Ego), still more slowly but far more imperfectly and incompletely to the shell, and fully to the Ego at the moment of its entrance into the Devachan. And now, the latter being a state determined and brought by its past life, the Ego does not fall headlong but sinks into it gradually and by easy stages. With the first dawn of that state appears that life (or rather is once more lived over by the Ego) from its first day of consciousness to its last. From the most important down to the most trifling event, all are marshalled before the spiritual eye of the Ego; only, unlike the events of real life, those of them remain only that are chosen by the new liver (pardon the word) clinging to certain scenes and actors, these remain permanently — while all the others fade away to disappear for ever, or to return to their creator — the shell. Now try to understand this highly important, because so highly just and retributive law, in its effects. Out of the resurrected Past nothing remains but what the Ego has felt spiritually — that was evolved by and through, and lived over by his spiritual faculties — be they love or hatred. All that I am now trying to describe is in truth — indescribable. As no two men, not even two photographs of the same person, nor yet two leaves resemble line for line each other, so no two states in Devachan are like. Unless he be an adept, who can realize such a state in his periodical Devachan — how can one be expected to form a correct picture of the same?